Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Tao Te Ching translated by Ursula Le Guin (1997)

github.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

81–90 of 125 posts

Re: Tao Te Ching translated by Ursula Le Guin (1997)

#81

Post by noufalibrahim »

kjkjadksj wrote: post #72
noufalibrahim wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The way i look at it is that written language itself is a translation of an idea onto a page. Something is lost or atleast becomes ambiguous without an interpreter or a teacher or at the least, a detailed commentary. This is not that much of problem for a casual piece of text but for something that has much more potential impact, it's huge. Translating laws or perhaps the constitution of a country can all but change…

This is probably why we put so much emphasis on precedent over the actual text of the law. Likewise with the bible, perhaps not as much with the christians at least these days, but the Jews have their talmud that interprets the book ad nauseum through centuries of rabbis spitballing their interpretation of the base text, ending up with things like a string hung from telephone polls to represent the walls of the templ…

It's there in Islam too but the interpretive techniques are mostly confined to finding rulings about things that didn't exist back then. eg. Commerce over the internet, Alms calculation on money (as opposed to wealth) etc.

I have heard something about the Jewish history of making these kinds of interpretations to "work around" scriptural laws. I think it was in a book by Israel Shahak where I first came across it.

In any case, yes. Precedent is important and even though it's not fully reliable, we will usually have a lot of stuff that cancels out errors.

Re: Tao Te Ching translated by Ursula Le Guin (1997)

#82

Post by bogdan »

darby_nine wrote: post #54
teraflop wrote: post #5

I love Le Guin's writing in general, and her version of the Tao Te Ching, but it's very misleading to call it a "translation". There's even an endnote saying as much: > This is a rendition, not a translation. I do not know any Chinese. I could approach the text at all only because Paul Carus, in his 1898 translation of the Tao Te Ching, printed the Chinese text with each character followed by a transliteration and a…

> but it's very misleading to call it a "translation" Only if you completely abandon most people's understanding of the word. I don't understand the point of this comment.

The author said it herself.

Re: Tao Te Ching translated by Ursula Le Guin (1997)

#83

Post by HenryBemis »

I quickly searched the comments and noticed there there is no mention of the James Legge translation. I checked them side-by-side for the first couple of pages, and I like the Legge translation more (not trashing Le Guin's though).

For anyone who may be interested: https://sacred-texts.com/tao/taote.htm

Re: Tao Te Ching translated by Ursula Le Guin (1997)

#84

Post by mjd »

sorokod wrote: post #76
mjd wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I don't fault her on this I do. She didn't know Chinese. For her to attempt a translation (by mashing up earlier translations) shows contempt for Chinese culture and literature. https://www.jstor.org/stable/j.ctt1wn0qtj.12

Do you feel as strongly about king James version of the bible?

How is that relevant? Unlike Le Guin, the translators of the KJV knew the original languages.

Re: Tao Te Ching translated by Ursula Le Guin (1997)

#85

Post by mbivert »

jerf wrote: post #38
mbivert wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Now how do we translate this into ten or more English words? I think it's fair to say that written Chinese simply allows to encode more information than English. So it's "physically impossible": translation from Chinese is a lossy operation. We can only provide a reasonable approximation. Even at the character level, some information just can't get through. "道" for example contains both "辶" (to walk) and "首" (head,…

Native English speakers, and especially native English speakers who do not have fluency in another language, also often have a "familiarity breeds contempt" situation going on with their own language and are not aware of the fact that English is also a rich language, filled with cultural allusions, subtleties in the connotations versus the denotations, rich histories than span continents behind many words, distinct p…

> It isn't just Chinese -> English that loses information. The other direction does too

Yes, definitely. People who think studying "dead" languages is a loss of time are foolish.

There's even a somewhat "gain" of information which can chaotically appear in translation. For example if we decompose "道" as "walking" and "head" and translate it in French we get "une tête qui marche", which means both "a walking head" or more interestingly, "a working head."

But it's not because English is richer than commonly believed than Chinese isn't still more spacious, which I do believe for multiple reasons, one of them being that it's a pictographic language:

  A picture is worth a thousand words.
Some of the "etymology" is more readily available, so to speak. But we could also consider "hidden etymology" -- ancient character forms -- which, as for Western languages, would enrich the interpretations.

Re: Tao Te Ching translated by Ursula Le Guin (1997)

#86

Post by clickglue »

mbivert wrote: post #17

I'll always remember from when I was a teenager, the visual symmetry of the first two sentences of the Tao Te Ching, echoing the "yin-yang symbol" 道可道， 非常道。 名可名， 非常名。 Here's a translation: The Dao that can be stated, is not the eternal Dao; The name that can be named is not the eternal name. So much is lost when translating from Chinese.

Thank you so much for this insight! I like to understand it as a comment on language itself: our words and names will never be enough to actually capture the eternal. The eternal can never be trimmed down to words.

Re: Tao Te Ching translated by Ursula Le Guin (1997)

#87

Post by mbivert »

noufalibrahim wrote: post #64
mbivert wrote: post #17

I'll always remember from when I was a teenager, the visual symmetry of the first two sentences of the Tao Te Ching, echoing the "yin-yang symbol" 道可道， 非常道。 名可名， 非常名。 Here's a translation: The Dao that can be stated, is not the eternal Dao; The name that can be named is not the eternal name. So much is lost when translating from Chinese.

The way i look at it is that written language itself is a translation of an idea onto a page. Something is lost or atleast becomes ambiguous without an interpreter or a teacher or at the least, a detailed commentary. This is not that much of problem for a casual piece of text but for something that has much more potential impact, it's huge. Translating laws or perhaps the constitution of a country can all but change…

> Something is lost or at least becomes ambiguous without an interpreter or a teacher or at the least, a detailed commentary

The problem with teachers or detailed commentaries, is that they may not agree with each others, or could be too narrow or even wrong: as as student looking for knowledge, you wouldn't be able to distinguish valuable interpretations from limited ones.

I think it might be judicious to look as ambiguity more as a feature than as a bug. Classical Chinese authors seems to have purposefully relied on it for example.

Re: Tao Te Ching translated by Ursula Le Guin (1997)

#88

Post by otabdeveloper4 »

canjobear wrote: post #75
nine_k wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I suppose that wenyan is not a normal spoken language [1], but a form of a literary encoding, more like poetry meeting stenography, and a way to crystallize the meaning without excessive syntax. English translation requires many more words because a "normal", vernacular Chinese rendition would also require many more words. My suggestion is to assume quotes: "Dao which is 'dao' is not true dao", that is, the mere word…

It was a bona fide spoken language at the time the Daodejing was written. Likely sounding very little like modern Chinese.

It was likely an inflected language at the time it was spoken, and they just left the tedious grammar bits out when writing.

Re: Tao Te Ching translated by Ursula Le Guin (1997)

#89

Post by bubblyworld »

mjd wrote: post #74
sophyphreak wrote: post #55

I've studied classical Chinese. Ursula Le Guin's translation does not retain much feeling or meaning from the original. I don't fault her on this though because most translations of the Daodejing are like this. I recommend Philip J. Ivanhoe's translation, which has its own flaws as well. If we want to go out into the weeds a bit, I think this text is ethereal in the original but despite this, most translations tend t…

> I don't fault her on this I do. She didn't know Chinese. For her to attempt a translation (by mashing up earlier translations) shows contempt for Chinese culture and literature. https://www.jstor.org/stable/j.ctt1wn0qtj.12

I don't think Ursula Le Guin ever called it a translation herself - she was pretty clear about it being a rendition of existing translations.

Re: Tao Te Ching translated by Ursula Le Guin (1997)

#90

Post by mbivert »

keepamovin wrote: post #78
mbivert wrote: post #17

I'll always remember from when I was a teenager, the visual symmetry of the first two sentences of the Tao Te Ching, echoing the "yin-yang symbol" 道可道， 非常道。 名可名， 非常名。 Here's a translation: The Dao that can be stated, is not the eternal Dao; The name that can be named is not the eternal name. So much is lost when translating from Chinese.

> So much is lost when translating from Chinese. I don’t think this common, glib aphorism has to be true. It all depends on how your mind works, or what statement you have. Do you require ambiguity, and inferentialness to be explicitly clothed as such, as in Chinese, or can you take the words themselves, that can be concrete meanings, and use them as a jumping point to infer on your own? As in English. There's also a…

> I don’t think this common, glib aphorism has to be true.

> or that Chinese has some greater expressive quality than other languages, which is arrogant bullshit and not true.

Well, as stated a few moments ago in a previous comment:

  A picture is worth a thousand words.
I'd be (genuinely) curious if you had more precise inputs as to why Chinese language (pictographic) wouldn't be more expressive than Western's (alphabet-based): I think there's reasons to not be so quickly dismissive.

> The path that can be walked is not the AllPath. The word that can be said is not the AllWord.

Well, aren't you for example losing here the echo to the daiji? With all its "philosophical" significance?

> Btw, What does your regular Chinese person think about this book? I know it’s very popular in the west. Is it popular in Chinese speaking regions as well? What do people think about it?

A few isolated data points: most Chinese persons I know consider classical Chinese "old unreadable stuff" and don't seem to care much for it. But plenty of Westerners (Europe) don't care much for old Western texts either (e.g. Iliad, Plato, Bible).

Post reply on HN